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Thursday

Say Thanks to Someone Who Served

Forget about Rv recalls for a minute. A few years ago, a local farmer came in to see me for some help. Bills and crop prices and debt had him over a barrel and we talked about bankruptcy and what it could and couldn’t do to help relieve his situation. He was a big strong man, the way some farmers just naturally are, both in his heart and his size. We were about the same age but he looked so much older.

His situation took about 5 months to get resolved but I will never forget the day that I learned that he was a chopper pilot in Vietnam about the same time as my older brother, Larry, was there. I had no clue and never would have guessed.

We both stopped what we were talking about, his own current problem, while he looked out the window and quietly talked about what it was like then, back in Vietnam. It was hard for me to look at this older and much heavier man and try to imagine what he must have looked like back in the days of 1966-'68. Now, he was mostly bald and probably weighed a lot more than he did back then, but like me he had been young once too. Now, he didn't move as quick as he undoubtedly did in 'nam either.

But you could tell from the distance in his eyes as he spoke that he had never really left it all behind him.

He talked about what it was like to fly a chopper in and out of valleys and hills and fire, dropping down as quickly as he could and picking up a wounded soldier or two and getting back out of there, wherever "there" was, as fast as he could. Nothing but plexiglass between him and the bullets.

He said he loved flying helicopters then, but that he was never in his life as scared as he was in those few minutes between the time just before he would land and when he was back out of the worst of the fire. He said they were the longest minutes of his life. He called it "dodging a lifetime of bullets," scared to death that one of them had his name on it.

He had a dusty old baseball cap in his hand as we talked. It hung loosely in his hand as he gazed aimlessly out the window. It was from some team that didn't really matter, I'm sure. His eyes were never in the room with us as he calmly and matter-of-factly talked of how men died around him and also of those who came back like him.

You could tell he had memories he wished he didn't have. He said the worst feeling he had from the whole war was that every time he'd lift off the ground he knew that while he was getting out of there, he was leaving other boys behind. He'd fly away, his heart pounding loud in his chest, while the fighting went on below him.

After a long while, he stopped talking and we just sat there, not talking at all. I could see that things were going on inside his mind and I just didn't know what to say. I was dumbstruck by this seemingly now-gentle giant of a man who had been through hell. Truth be told, I didn't think I had a right to say anything at all. After what seemed like the longest time, both of us returned to the present moment. He never spoke about it again.

It's been years now. I don't even remember his name. Probably most of the guys he saved didn't remember it either. I haven't thought of him since then until my older brother sent me a recording he found on the internet, called God's Own Lunatics (click below) that explained what it was like to be one of those foot soldiers on the ground. I clicked on it, listened, and the memory all came back to me.

I recall that he was the son of a local farmer who had gone off to war and came back all grown up - to be his father's son, a farmer again. Something about beating your swords into plows seems appropriate for me to end this note but it also seems so trivial a thing to say. I can still recall his face.
We all owe veterans a whole lot more than any of us will ever be able to repay. If you know someone who served, shake their hand and thank them. You don't need to say why. They'll know.

About Me

After High School in Ohio, I attended two years of college at Miami University while working at a factory and lifeguarding at a local lake. Then I enlisted in the Air Force during the Vietnam era and served in Texas, Illinois, and California before being discharged. I finished college studies in California where I worked with retired Federal Communications Commissioner H. Rex Lee. He and Dr.s Jameson and Jones influenced my decision to attend law school, so I returned to Ohio, graduating in 1978. While in law school I clerked for James D. Ruppert, an incredible Ohio trial attorney who taught me more about what it really meant to be an attorney who helped regular people, and especially about being a trial attorney, than all of law school. I owe most of my professional accomplishments to his mentoring. I opened my own law office a few years later. While working with Jim Ruppert I became interested in Consumer Law so that I could help everyday people solve everyday problems. I never left those roots and although I have spent a lifetime doing it, it is still what I do today. What I am today as a man, I owe to my father, who taught me to always care deeply about what is right. He always was, and is still, a remarkable man. My tolerance of the rough patches in the road of life is something I think my mother gave me. What I became as a husband, I owe to my wife, Linda, who taught me that love alone is all that a life really needs. What I have been as a father, and am as a (young, I like to think) grandfather, I owe to my two children, who taught me that the smile of a child and the love and protection offered by one's big hand holding a small hand is really all a child needs. They also taught me that it was something I needed to. I have learned a lot from other people too while on this road, but the greatest gift I ever received was from a nameless Vietnam vet in Griffith Park in Los Angeles years ago. I was not supposed to be in that city that day but was called there on unexpected business and had some spare time so I went for a walk and met him there near a park bench. He spoke softly from his well-worn scratched up wheelchair and shook my hand with his left hand because he had no right arm. In our brief meeting I never learned his name, but he taught me that the most important thing a person can do in this life is to help someone else. If I had not gone for a walk in the park that day, while in a city where I didn't live, on a trip that almost wasn't, I would have missed that lesson that day. It's something I live to do every day now. Because doing that, helping people, that is what's right.